Medical Cannabis Vs. Morphine (The Difference)

Medical Cannabis Vs. Morphine (The Difference)

Currently, in the United States, there is an ongoing health crisis. The health crisis doesn’t involve a viral disease but a worrying & dangerous health issue similar to serious health complications.

The worrying health issue is the over-prescription and abuse of opioids. Authorities have recorded a worrying increase in the abuse of these drugs. In most states, individuals are even afraid to mention these drugs when seeking to relieve their pain, regardless of their dosages or uses.

Most users and individuals have carried the fear of opioid abuse and over-prescription to medical marijuana use. Some users currently fear the possibility of medical cannabis abuse, the same as they do for other useful drugs like morphine.

If you're looking to understand more and beat the fear of using medical cannabis, you're in the right place. Read through the article to understand how medical marijuana is safe and learn more about the key differences between morphine versus medical cannabis.

What is Morphine? And How Does It Affect the Body?

Most individuals find morphine as one of the most strange drugs. Users only understand how often to use it and what it does in the human body, but very few understand how morphine works.

Commonly, the primary use of morphine is to help patients in relieving pain in most hospitals worldwide. Medical experts extract this drug from a plant in the opiate family, which originates from poppy plants.

After assimilating it into your body, the drugs start to interact with your nervous system. The interaction helps to shut off or relieve all the pain sensations throughout your various body parts.

For example, the drug will play an essential role in relieving your body from pain following an accident or after giving birth. Despite the pain-relieving benefits, this drug also comes with some consequences.

The consequences include the known addiction property of the drug or plant. Morphine has an incredibly addictive feature, making users feel like inducing more after having a few doses. The addiction property has led to the spike of an opioid epidemic in the United States. Individuals tend to become addicted to the drug after a doctor’s prescription to some form of opioid therapy following an injury or pain, yet they can’t get more.

Sadly, being unable to get more opioid doses, these addicted individuals turn to street drugs, such as fentanyl or heroin. In most cases, these drugs lead to unsafe drug habits and poor health.

In addition, apart from the drug’s pain-relieving effects, its users may experience some psychoactive highness. The form of highness makes them feel loopy, lacking focus, disorientated, and leading them to silliness & laughter.

During the highness states, the users lack long-term memory retention. Thus, they’ll only vaguely remember all the events, which happened to them after being high on the drug.

The awful consequences and general effects of opiates and other drugs make most individuals in the USA fear using the drugs. Additionally, with the consequences, most medical experts reduce the rate at which they prescribe these painkillers.

Unfortunately, the fear is transiting to the use of other drugs, including medical marijuana. So, it'll be vital to understand how cannabis works and its interaction with the body system.

What is Medical Marijuana? How Does it Affect Your Body? 

Importantly, it’ll be good to understand that medical cannabis has the most features similar to regular marijuana. Nonetheless, the only difference is that, while cultivating, the medical experts aim to achieve a particular percentage of CBD or THC.

When using cannabis for medical purposes, its dried buds are more important than the other parts, as they are rich in cannabinoid compounds. These compounds are similar to those in the human body system, and they stimulate the interaction with your body’s endocannabinoid system.

THC comes with the ability to suppress any pains in the body, for starters. It achieves the pain-relieving property in different ways, as compared to morphine. Numerous studies like ‘Journal of Frontiers in Pharmacology’ by Vuckovic et al. show that THC can act as an analgesic. Especially when dealing with neuropathic pain, THC becomes an essential painkiller.

Additionally, the CBD, THC, and other cannabinoids properties interact with your brains to release neurochemicals. They also stimulate and promote the release of additional mood-lifting and beneficial neurochemicals, such as serotonin. Lastly, these cannabis properties help to fight certain mental disorders like anxiety and depression.

As compared to morphine, cannabis takes less time and intensity to suppress your body pains. More importantly, unlike morphine, marijuana comes with little to no addiction effects, thus relieving you from the high dependency nature.

After using marijuana, it offers a high similar to morphine’s highness; however, it may vary or change depending on the strain type. You have a wide range of effects ranging from sleepiness and relaxation to high energy levels and creativity, depending on the strain you use.

Primarily, most people use this drug for their different recreational needs because of its physical dependency and the numerous benefits it offers. The benefits may include having a generally pleasant and worthwhile high. This high encourages most individuals to try and keep using it because they like it.

After understanding the two drugs and how they function, it’ll be essential to look at their primary differences. Below are the main differences between morphine and cannabis.

Morphine Is Addictive, While Marijuana Is Not 

The primary and most vital difference between these two drugs is that morphine is physically addictive while marijuana is not. Despite the plenty of terrifying propaganda and advertisement campaigns surrounding marijuana fever, it’s essential to understand that this drug doesn’t induce any form of physical dependency.

Nonetheless, overuse of cannabis usually results in some form of increased tolerance. These effects force you to gradually increase the dosage every time you use the drug to achieve the same impact. Any physical dependence will generally depend on your psychological desire to achieve the continuous effects, but not the chemical or physical reliance.

Stopping the continuous use of opioids comes with some ravaging effects, like massive cramping, heightened anxiety, dysphoria, and cravings. The effects may result in a sudden loss of motility and weight loss. In contrast, quitting marijuana after some duration of using it doesn’t come with such horrifying effects, apart from a slight headache. After quitting marijuana, you might only miss its high and the additional health effects, nothing more.

Despite physical dependence being the key difference between the drugs, we've got other differences that make most users choose cannabis over morphine.

You Get to Pick the Appropriate Cannabis Strain, While Morphine Is Just Morphine 

When most users think that all drugs come in the same type and dosage, it's essential to understand that there exists a huge difference between morphine and cannabis. Morphine comes in one form for the users, while cannabis has a wide range of options available for medical patients to consider choosing the appropriate one.

Morphine comes in one form mainly because it's an extracted compound from the same variety of poppies worldwide. The extraction from the same poppy plants makes all the drug samples have similar chemical properties and compositions.

However, cannabis comes with different medical cannabidiols effects resulting from the different strains and levels of CBD, THC, or other valuable cannabinoids. In addition, the terpenes trace amounts in the different cannabis are vital for the different effects of this drug.

Thus, it implies that the licensed growers bred some strains with higher CBD concentration and some terpenes quantities rather than THC. Therefore, medical practitioners can use these strains to treat epilepsy. Some studies like ‘Journal of Epilepsy Research’ by Emilio Perucca discover that the strains with high CBD levels work well to help combat the different symptoms of epilepsy.

With the gradual rise in the use of marijuana, there is the emergence of numerous strains with the highest THC levels in the market. These strains come with numerous recreational or health benefits by helping suppress the different types of pain.

The wide range of marijuana strains and components available makes medical marijuana far much better than morphine. You can select the right choice and quantity of strains and composition necessary from your treatment or dosage requirements with the different strains and types available. Nonetheless, when using morphine, you have to bear with the one type of morphine drug available, as you don’t have an option for a weaker or stronger drug dose.

Final Verdict about Medical Cannabis versus Morphine 

Importantly, it’s wrong to conclude that the drug is completely safe despite having numerous positive effects and quality. After taking the cannabis dosage, we’ve got some individuals who may experience some adverse reactions to the drug. The effects of medical cannabis usage may vary among individuals due to the differences in the concentration and variety of cannabinoids. Different strains and concentrations come with different effects on the users’ body systems. Even doctors won’t be able to predict the possible effects accurately.

Despite having some negative health effects, medical cannabis is the preferable option to morphine. The reason being the use of morphine comes with an inherently problematic nature.

Most health facilities are finding it hard to move from using morphine as a temporary analgesic because of its powerful pain-relieving features that the other available options lack. However, there is a gradual transition to using medical cannabis for pain-relieving and long-term care.

Lastly, despite thinking that morphine and medical cannabis are the same drugs because of their similar use to relieve pain, it’ll be good to understand that you can't use them interchangeably. Morphine might be one of the dominating pain-relieving drugs, but medical cannabis is gradually becoming a mainstay of medical occurrence. Therefore, it’ll be necessary to understand that most experts are gradually rolling out safer and cheaper options.

Despite the traditional myths surrounding the use of cannabis, it’s the best and safer option than morphine.